Jeff
Corey and John Randolph, friends since the 1930s, recall a time when politics
nearly ended their acting careers--until they came back for
"Seconds."

Reporting
by Rob Kendt

Young
actors Arthur Zwerling and Morton Lippmann met in the early 1930s at the
Theatre Collective in New York and became fast friends and mutual admirers.
Years later, after Zwerling had changed his name to Jeff Corey and become a
Hollywood actor, and Lippmann had changed his name to John Randolph and become
a busy actor on the New York stage and in early live TV, both were subpoenaed
by the House on Un-American Activities Committee, which began its notorious
investigation into alleged Communist influence in all sectors of society,
including show business, on October 27, 1997.

Every
actor faces patches of unemployment, but when Randolph and Corey were
blacklisted for pleading the Fifth before the HUAC, they were effectively shut
out of acting employment for most of the 1950s and the better part of the
1960s--especially in Hollywood, where the blacklist was ruthlessly enforced.
Corey travelled, spent time with his family, and became a respected acting
coach; Randolph continued as an activist to fight the blacklist, working from
the slightly more liberal homebase of New York.

Eventually,
the two were reunited in Hollywood on the 1966 John Frankenheimer satire Seconds (which also broke the
blacklist for co-star Will Geer), and worked together again at the Mark Taper
Forum in 1971 in In the Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer. Both had a second,
unexpected post-blacklist career: Corey's credits went on to include In Cold
Blood, Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, True Grit, and Little Big Man, while Randolph
appeared in such films as All the President's Men, Serpico, The Front, and Prizzi's Honor. Both still teach
acting, Corey privately and Randolph at his daughter-in-law Kate's school, the
Cunningham Conservatory, named for his late wife, Sarah Cunningham.

Corey
and Randolph met recently at Musso and Frank to recall the ups and downs of
their careers and the vagaries of Hollywood politics. Both will be guests of
honor at "Hollywood Remembers the Blacklist," an evening program
scheduled for Oct. 27, 1997--the 50th anniversary of the beginning of the HUAC hearings--hosted
by the four major entertainment talent guilds at the Samuel Goldwyn Theatre at
the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Beverly Hills.

John
Randolph:
I watched you as an actor at the Theatre Collective. I didn't know who you were,
but you were the only one I really loved as an actor. Everybody else was so
full of anguish and nervousness.

Jeff
Corey:
No, they were very sincere, and very real--and inaudible.

John: Yeah, I thought, I'm
too cheerful for this group. We both had other names then.

Jeff: Yeah, they told me to
change my name, so I thought of a bucolic name, to play cowboys and such:
"Jeff Corey." And I got a call for a film with William Dieterle, a
very liberal man who left Nazi Germany and still believed in numerology. He
said that numerologically, my name was perfect for his film, The Devil and
Daniel Webster.

John: Yeah, then you began to
be a star in California, and I was beginning to be blacklisted back in New
York--you were being blacklisted at the same time, but I didn't know that.

Jeff: Yeah, they imposed on
both of us. It was very inconvenient. About a year before the Hollywood Ten,
the State Un-American Activities Committee in California subpoenaed several
members of the Group Theatre who were with the Actors' Lab out here. We were
accused of producing the plays of Shaw, O'Casey, and Chekhov. Guilty as
charged!

We
were advised not to talk to the FBI without a lawyer present. But when they
came to my door, I invited them to sit down and we talked for about two and a
half hours. And they made certain assumptions. They said, "You're probably
ready to talk about these things now because of what's happened in
Czechoslovakia and Hungary." And I told them, "I deplore what
happened in Czechoslovakia and Hungary. I deplored the Moscow trials." And
they said, "Why don't you put it in writing?"

John: In New York, we all had
to sign the CBS loyalty thing. We told 'em to go screw themselves, but a lot of
people who didn't sign got penalized for it. We also got letters from AFTRA
that said, "If you do not cooperate with House Committee, you can be
fined, suspended, or expelled." Well, if you're an actor, you can't even
get a job without that! Frankly, we were in better shape than you were out in
California. Broadway was the first to not blacklist.

Jeff: AFTRA has apologized
for that, by the way.

John: Oh yeah, and the Screen
Actors Guild. All that crap is out.

Forgive but Don't Forget

John: After Seconds, I met Betty Garrett,
who was married to Larry Parks (who had cooperated with HUAC). My wife's
reaction was, "I feel sorry for him." Other actors I was with
probably felt, "I hate the sonofabitch." But I don't blame anybody.
The very guy who gave my name and Sarah's name was a roommate of mine when we
were doing a show on the road. We used to make food for each other, and I never
talked politics with him. Later on, I found out he was seeing an FBI
pyschoanalyst, who was telling him that he'd better give up names, otherwise
he'd be sent back to Canada. I mean, it was that kind of thing.

We
didn't keep a grudge afterwards. When I got hired in an Arthur Miller play out
here, I played a villain and Larry Parks played the leading part. And when we
met him--there were six actors in the cast who had been blacklisted or been
before the committee--we didn't know what to do. Sarah went up to Larry and
introduced herself and said, "I'm John Randolph's wife," and he said,
"I know that." And everybody else went up and just shook hands. I
mean, we were faced with a reality: We had to go on, we had two weeks to
rehearse. Larry never talked about it. Only in his eyes--when I played Miltie,
the fake, and I said, "I'm going to give names," I saw in his eyes a
flicker, that's all.

Jeff: I worked with producers
who had been informers. We'd have conversations but not looking at each other;
I'd be looking at the set, they'd be looking at the set, we'd make small talk.
I worked a few days with Elia Kazan on The Last Tycoon, and he came up and
gave me a hug, and said, "We're both survivors, Jeff," and I said,
under my breath, "But on different rafts."

John: Again, you cannot make
it a black and white thing. Some of these producers were good people. I didn't
know anything about them. My agent would bring up my name and threaten to sue
them--Jack Fields, he was a wonderful guy who took in blacklisted actors who
came to Hollywood when nobody else did.

But
I want to say, there were people during that time who stood up against J. Edgar
Hoover, who wanted to get rid of everybody. Obviously, there is hidden in the
American people, in my feeling, a reason to be for justice, in one way or
another. I'm not waving a flag, but I've met wonderful people who are on the
other side of the fence, who agreed with me or talked with me on certain
issues.

Jeff: I'd like to make a
statement.

John: Oh, you'd like to make
a statement?

Jeff: I think blacklisted
people have been really model citizens. I don't think any of us ever failed to
vote. We're interested in every local and national election. And we've been
good parents. My kids are connected to the children of other people who were
blacklisted, and the grandchildren reach out to each other. It's an
extraordinary extended family; I feel so good about it.

John: I'm on the same
wavelength with you on that.

Jeff: Still, as Lee Hays,
from Pete Seeger's group, the Weavers, said, "If it wasn't for the honor
of it, I'd just as soon not have been blacklisted."